The Save The Plough campaign group have announced that their bid to buy The Plough has been beaten by a higher offer from another party that wishes to reopen the pub:

The Plough, Sandygate Road

We submitted our bid to the agents last week. Our bid was based on a professional valuation of £435,000 which also included the third car park adjacent to the sports ground.

We were informed by the agents that the third car park had now been taken out of the sale but we stood by our bid.

In discussions with both the agents and Enterprise Inns this week, we were asked if we could increase our bid to match one which was ‘significantly’ higher than ours. We did not want to get drawn into a bidding war and restated that our bid was a fair and reasonable offer.

It seems that Enterprise Inns will go with the higher offer. We do not know who the other bidder is but Enterprise did say it was someone who wants to reopen the pub and it is someone with a track record in the industry.

Despite the fact that we now seem to have reached the end of the road for our project, we would like to thank everyone who has supported the campaign and those who pledged to invest in a community pub. Local people have shown great support for the Plough and we think that this has persuaded other investors that it can be a viable pub and a great local.

Obviously, there is some disappointment in that we might not meet our aim of reopening the Plough as a community run pub but we feel that we can all be proud of what we achieved. When our campaign began in June 2016, our original campaign slogan was ‘Save the Plough’ and it looks like we have done that. If we had not successfully campaigned against Sainsbury’s application for change of the use, the pub would have been lost forever.

During the course of our campaign, it has become clear that there is tremendous community spirit in Crosspool and it would be great if that community spirit could be channeled into other local projects – any ideas?

Once again, we would like to thank everyone for their support throughout a long and challenging campaign and, whenever we had a low point as a campaign group, the support of the community always got us through.